Is Richard Jenkyns right regarding the lack of ideology in…
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Is Richard Jenkyns right regarding the lack of ideology in Jane Austen’s work?
Jenkyns is a Professor of the Classical Tradition at Oxford University, and I found this interesting quote by him on A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen.
“The attempt to recruit Jane Austen into one of the armies in an ideological war is mistaken... It is indeed useful to compare her to her contemporaries...to confirm her originality and independence, and appreciate how distinctively absent ideology is from her fiction. She ranks not among those novelists like Tolstoy and George Eliot who are in some sense teachers or preachers, but among those like James and Proust, for whom the depiction and analysis of human beings in thought and action are enough. Or in different terms, she is of the school of Sophocles and Shakespeare, not that of Dante and Milton.”
I’m intrigued to hear thoughts on this… frankly I’ve struggled to find the strong ideological commentary others have claimed in Austen’s work, however again I’m interested in hearing different perspectives.
#entertainment
Jenkyns is a Professor of the Classical Tradition at Oxford University, and I found this interesting quote by him on A Fine Brush on Ivory: An Appreciation of Jane Austen.
“The attempt to recruit Jane Austen into one of the armies in an ideological war is mistaken... It is indeed useful to compare her to her contemporaries...to confirm her originality and independence, and appreciate how distinctively absent ideology is from her fiction. She ranks not among those novelists like Tolstoy and George Eliot who are in some sense teachers or preachers, but among those like James and Proust, for whom the depiction and analysis of human beings in thought and action are enough. Or in different terms, she is of the school of Sophocles and Shakespeare, not that of Dante and Milton.”
I’m intrigued to hear thoughts on this… frankly I’ve struggled to find the strong ideological commentary others have claimed in Austen’s work, however again I’m interested in hearing different perspectives.
#entertainment
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